Let me ask you a different question, ‘‘Why English?’’ Well you know the answer to that; it is a language you speak. Think a little further, what is the most widely spoken human language? Chinese is the mother tongue for more people than any other language, so why are you not writing in Chinese? On the other hand languages
like Spanish is far easier to learn than English so why are you not writing in one of those?
As you know, English is not only the mother tongue of a few hundred million people but it is also the second language for immensely more people. If you were an alien visitor to Earth I doubt that you would think twice about which human language you should start with. For all its complexity English is overwhelmingly the first choice language for those who want to move outside their own community.
C++ is very like that in the computing community. It is a rich and complex language with dark corners and traps for the unwary. But it is also the most widely used general-purpose computer programming language. Few people, if any, ever master the whole of English and few people, if any, master the whole of C++. But we do not need mastery of the whole of English nor do we need mastery of the whole of C++. This is not an article about C++ and when you finish it you will not be a C++ programmer.
What you will be is a programmer who can use C++ to express solutions to problems and to write programs that meet real needs.
Why C++? Exactly because C++ does not get in the way of my showing you how to program. Other programming languages may be simpler but too often I would find myself frustrated because they would prevent me from showing you simple answers to programming problems. I have been able to pick and choose from the richness of C++ to empower my readers with powerful tools that match powerful ideas.
C++ has one small failing in that the basic language lacks tools for graphical work. That was easily fixed because I could write those tools in C++ and make them available to you. I needed some specialist help with those tools because of the quirkiness of computers: they have different graphical facilities, numbers of colors on the screen, etc. Using C++ allowed me to specify what I needed and have a colleague turn those specifications into tools that will work on all MS Windows machines. Eventually
I will find others who can turn that C++ into identical tools for other machines but until I do, we have to put up with an artificial limitation in that programs you write using my tools will only work on machines running some version of MS Windows.